OCEANSIDE: WWII Japanese soldier's military record returned to family

Booklet found at Oceanside swap meet seven years ago

Vicki Prosser was stunned when an older couple handed her the
service booklet of a Japanese soldier killed at Iwo Jima in 1945
and asked her help in finding his family in Japan and getting the
document to them.

What were the odds? thought Prosser, who had just finished a
similar mission ---- returning a long-lost letter written by
another Japanese soldier who also died in the fierce fighting on
the island in the closing days of World War II.

"I was thrilled," said Prosser, an aide to Oceanside City
Councilman Jack Feller and secretary of Oceanside's Sister Cities
Foundation. Oceanside is a sister city of Kisarazu, the Japanese
city near the family home of the soldier who wrote the letter.

The booklet the couple gave Prosser tells the life story of Pvt.
Toshiki Kawasaki from the time he was drafted into Japan's Army to
the time he was killed in a losing fight against U.S. Marines who
stormed Iwo Jima in one of the war's bloodiest battles.

Within days of getting the booklet, Prosser ---- with the help
of Orange County World War II historian Dan King and a Japanese
acquaintance, Nobuhiro Nakamura ---- tracked down Kawasaki's
younger brother, Sadao, and returned the booklet to him ---- ending
an odyssey that began at an Oceanside swap meet about seven years
ago.

That's when former British Royal Air Force plane mechanic Edward
Cordner, 91, of Oceanside came across Kawasaki's booklet, in a box
of old papers someone was selling, said Cordner's wife, Edna,
80.

"An ex-serviceman himself, he recognized it as a Japanese
soldier's pay book," Edna Cordner said. "It was just in a box of
papers and people were thumbing through it and he just happened to
see that particular item."

After reading Kawasaki's service booklet and hearing from his
family, King, who is fluent in Japanese, pieced together the
soldier's history.

As it turns out, Kawasaki had eerie ties to major historical
events, from his birth to his death.

He was born in 1920 in Nagasaki, one of only two cities to ever
have been struck by an atomic bomb. Hiroshima was the first on Aug.
6, 1945, followed by Nagasaki on Aug. 9. Within days, Japan
surrendered, ending World War II.

Kawasaki was drafted in December 1940 and discharged three years
later on Dec. 7, 1943, on the two-year anniversary of Japan's sneak
attack on Pearl Harbor, which brought the United States into the
war. He was recalled to service in June 1944 ---- the same month as
D-Day, the Allied invasion of Europe that spelled the beginning of
the end of the war in Europe. And he died at Iwo Jima in what was a
key battle in ending the war.

The Cordners, who moved to Oceanside in 1968 after immigrating
to the U.S. from Northern Ireland in 1963, knew none of Kawasaki's
history or even his name when they bought the booklet at the swap
meet.

But Edna Cordner said they knew it would be important to
someone, and they got it in hopes that someone could help them
return it to Kawasaki's family.